Version 1.6 of The Battle for Wesnoth, the lauded open source fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game, has been released with new campaign features, an improved multiplayer lobby, new unit portraits, new music, and an improved map editor. Additionally:

We hope there are no bugs left, but if you find any, report them. We are also looking for help in several areas, so that many other releases of similar caliber can follow this one. We are especially looking for translators, graphic artists (sprite, portraits, terrain, story images), music composers (a background in classical composition, and good equipment required), sound artists (for special effects), authors (writing/maintaining campaigns, creating content like unit descriptions, improving the ingame help) and, of course, coders. If you want to participate in developing Wesnoth, just have a look at the forum or visit us in the IRC channel #wesnoth-dev on irc.freenode.net.

Gizmodo has linked a demo video of the first complete Pandora open-source handheld game console, which was available for pre-ordering ($329.99 US) last fall. Developed through internet forum discussion, the hardware specs are:

ARM® Cortex™-A8 600Mhz+ CPU running Linux

430-MHz TMS320C64x+™ DSP Core

PowerVR SGX OpenGL 2.0 ES compliant 3D hardware

800×480 4.3″ 16.7 million colours touchscreen LCD

Wifi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth & High Speed USB 2.0 Host

Dual SDHC card slots & SVideo TV output

Dual Analogue and Digital gaming controls

43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad

Around 10+ Hours battery life

The video shows Quake 1 being played; if you’re interested in already available Linux handheld game device, there’s the GP2X.

It utilizes cellular automata to allow for literally hundreds or thousands of enemies on the map. The current alpha version has rudimentary graphics, no sound, and only one partial map, but supports 1-4 players on the same system, using keyboard and/or joysticks.

FOP is open source (GPL), and is already fun to play. The project is looking for artists to create all new artwork, and map designers to create some fun dungeons to crawl. Contact Bill Kendrick if you’d like to help out!

For the developers: Free Gamer posted about several open source 3D landscape generators recently; among them, the Blender plugin InnerWorld looks the most interesting. There’s also a Blender landscape modeling tutorial at Wikibooks.